How did Spanish medical professionals conceptualize individuals believed to be a mixture of the female and male genders through the interval of 1850–1960? Such folks disrupted gendered and sexual givens, and from a criminal and clinical point of view, required exam and resolution in keeping with their precise intercourse that allows you to let marriage, inheritance, and a “normal” social existence. This quantity charts the altering scientific discourse at the “hermaphrodite” or “intersex” people because the interrelationship among the physique, organic intercourse, and gender was once regularly reassessed and rewritten, making this the 1st significant research of Spanish hermaphroditism for the interval and a tremendous contribution to the transforming into curiosity during this topic around the globe.

How did Spanish medical professionals conceptualize people believed to be a mixture of the female and male genders throughout the interval of 1850–1960? Such individuals disrupted gendered and sexual givens, and from a felony and scientific point of view, required exam and resolution in response to their real intercourse so one can let marriage, inheritance, and a “normal” social existence.

Doctors not only invoked Galen to prove this point but referred to observation and illustration. Anatomists such as Bernardino de Montaña (1489–1558),66 Juan Valverde de Amusco (1525–88),67 Juan Fragoso (1530–97)68 and Andrés de León (1560–1602),69 theologians who wrote texts on the ‘conservation of health’ such as Blas Álvarez de Miravall (fl. 1597),70 or doctors who published influential books such as Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529–88),71 contributed to the consolidation of the representation of woman as an imperfect man.

29 This paragraph follows Cadden (1993: 33–4). 30 Daston and Park (1996: 120), citing Cadden (1993: 39–110). The influence of Arabic thought on the question of hermaphroditism, particularly with respect to Spain, is in need of further research. Greek philosophical thought was ‘rediscovered’ via the Islamic presence in Italy and Spain in the early new millennium, translated from Arabic into Latin and eventually vernacular languages. See Jacquart (1997). The Iberian wave of this thought via Arabic sources came in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when there was a popularization of Aristotle’s thought with Abd al Malik Ibn Zuhr’s medical treatise and the Generalities (1194) of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who discusses Aristotle and Galen.

Introduction 21 We have also tried to engage with insights on sex differences and the hermaphrodite from the broader sexological and medical press and from the literary world. We take it as axiomatic that popular perceptions of sexual issues would not necessarily follow scientific ones in chronological terms or with respect to actual perceptions. Literary representations coexist with scientific ideas in an often highly productive equation and we attempt here to evince chronological and conceptual disparities of hermaphrodites between medicine and more popular accounts.